Archives: Highlights
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Rewilding Tijuca National Park
To restore the park to its former glory, researchers knew which animals needed to be reintroduced: monkeys, rodents, tortoises, and even dung beetles all played crucial roles in keeping the forest healthy.
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Meet the Agouti!
Agoutis are large, adorable rodents found in Central and South America – and they’re critical players in keeping forest ecosystems healthy.
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Stopping the Spread of Avian Malaria
Over 50 species of honeycreeper once lived in Hawai’i, but now only 17 species remain after battling against invasive species and habitat loss. Today, even those survivors are threatened further by avian malaria. To stop the disease, conservationists use innovative techniques to suppress the population of the invasive mosquitoes that spread it.
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Meet Hawai’i’s Honeycreepers
Millions of years ago, a single rosefinch species arrived on the Hawai’ian islands and evolved into over 50 species of honeycreepers — a phenomenon known as adaptive radiation.
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Protecting the ‘Ua‘U Kani
The endangered wedge-tailed shearwater — also known as the ‘ua‘u kani — was in critical danger after many nesting sites in Hawaii were overrun by predators like weasels, rags, or feral cats. Fortunately for the birds, locals banded together to protect nesting sites and the local population went from just 30 nesting birds to more…
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Luring Seabirds Back Home
A group in Maui has restored a safe haven for endangered seabirds to come home and nest: it’s completely fenced-off from predators and restored with native plants, but the birds still need some convincing! The team is using decoy “neighbors” and audio recordings of bird calls to make the seabirds feel at home — and…
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Community Action to Save Coral Reefs
This community in Hawaii is rallying together to study and protect local corals. Students, volunteers, and scientists work to collect and categorize fragments broken off from the reef, which then become candidates to breed before the new coral is reintroduced back into the ocean.
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Breeding Heat-Resilient Corals
Corals are vital to ocean health, but they’re susceptible to rising water temperatures and can “bleach” under too much heat stress. Hawaii’s Coral Resilience Lab is breeding corals that are resilient to these hotter ocean temperatures – then they populate reefs with new corals that can finally beat the heat.
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Manatee Rehabilitation
Florida manatees are in dire straits, having lost much of their available habitat and food sources in recent decades. Thanks to the work of Zoo Tampa and other researchers, the population is finally able to recover and return to the rivers they once called home.
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Restoring Crystal River
Florida’s Crystal River used to be a rich seagrass ecosystem: a perfect source of food for the many manatees that once thrived there, before an invasive algae overtook the riverbed. Now, efforts to restore the habitat are underway – and they’re working!
